The future of
opera in America took a double nosedive this week with Gerard Mortier’s
decision to quit New York’s City Opera before he started and Placido
Domingo’s to postpone indefinitely – and probably cancel - a Ring Cycle
in Washington D.C.

Both retractions were ascribed to the financial crisis, but that’s less
than half the story. Mortier, 64, said he had been promised a $60
million budget to make City Opera competitive with the Met, but the
board only managed $36 million, barely enough to pay the wage bill.
Domingo’s people said he couldn’t raise an extra $6 million to stage
Wagner’s epic vision in Barack Obama’s capital.

The real story, though, is one of ambivalence and distraction. Mortier,
from the day he signed with New York, kept his options open. Last
summer, the ebullient Belgian put in a last-minute bid to run Bayreuth
and in recent weeks he has been linked with possible changes at La Scala
and the Real in Madrid. He knew some weeks ago, when City Opera laid off
key staff, that the company was nowhere near meeting his budget. What
happens now to the Brokeback Mountain opera he commissioned is anyone’s
guess.

Domingo’s woes arise from his absurd attempt to run two opera companies
– the other is in Los Angeles – while continuing a singing career and
taking conducting gigs where he can get them. Like Macavity in TS
Eliot’s cats poem, when the mess is discovered Domingo is never there.
The cost of a Washington Ring came to one-fifth of the company’s budget,
an unrealistic target but one which got kicked from one deadline to the
next while the boss breezed in and out of town. Washington will now have
pay off the Ring singers or find them other roles. New York faces an
unbroken Met monopoly. And the rest of the opera world is going to catch
a terrible flu from these two American sneezes. Expect further
cancellations, somewhere close to home.

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